Edmund de Waal, author of the bestselling The Hare with Amber Eyes, is turning from the extraordinary history of his family to the history of his day job: crafting porcelain.

"It is about the history of [the colour] white and a journey through white," he said. "The book is about why the colour is so important and why I make white things."

His journey began in China, in the southern city of Jingdezhen, last year. This city of 1.5 million people has been digging kaolin clay from the mountains behind it for 1,700 years and turning the clay into porcelain.

This is where the Chinese emperors turned to for the dishes they used at court and where the blue-and-white ceramics of the Ming dynasty were perfected. "I picked up the trail in Jingdezhen, in that mountain where porcelain was first mined, I wanted to meet the people who quarry it," he said.

Porcelain developed in China during the Eastern Han dynasty (196 AD-220 AD) and had become a major export by the time of the Tang dynasty, some 400 years later.

"When they found porcelain, it had this combination of minerals that makes the whitest white possible. And it is translucent. It is white and it has light and that is very cool," said De Waal.

"And white is an incredibly powerful colour for the Chinese, of purity but also of death and mourning. Porcelain is difficult to get right but they worked out how to use it and then Jingdezhen became the supplier for the imperial court," he added.

In the Chinese archives, De Waal traced the correspondence from the kilns to the court. "Emperors would say things like: 'I want 4,000 white stem cups with lotus symbols', and the people in Jingdezhen would reply how difficult that would be and so on," he said.

Edmund de Waal with his artwork A Thousand Hours

Since then, there has been one unbroken line to the kilns of today. "I saw an extraordinary continuity of skills," said De Waal. "One of the questions I had was how come Jingdezhen still has people who have these skills when China had the Cultural Revolution, when everything was destroyed and you had this horrific disjunction. And the answer is that they made Mao statues".

Returning from Jingdezhen, De Waal brought with him a pair of fake Tang dynasty bowls, which his family now use to eat their breakfast cereal.

"If you go to the market on a Monday morning, you will find a lot of people who are selling shards of pots with the seals on them, the characters on them. People buy them and can incorporate them on new pots, reducing the seals to a paste and then refiring pots with the marks on them," he explained.

From Jingdezhen, De Waal traced the trade routes, along the Silk Road, following porcelain into Europe. "In Venice, I found a beautiful pot that Marco Polo brought back from China, the first bit of porcelain to reach the West."

His research for the book has not been sequential, and remains in the "early stages". He mentioned that he has visited Istanbul and Dresden as he follows the growth of the porcelain industry.

And, like The Hare with Amber Eyes, the broad sweep of history that De Waal is aiming to capture fits neatly with his own obsessions.

As he told the Telegraph in 2011: "The first pot I made was a white bowl; I was five. I remember the teacher saying, ‘We’ve got all these wonderful colours you can use,’ and me insisting that I wanted it white. It was an augury for a life of white bowls."